Program

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We give 10 minutes extra for papers with an artifact.

Keynote Speaker: Christopher Healey, Professor at North Carolina State University

Christopher Healey

Visualizing Text Sentiment in Twitter (PDF)

Abstract. In this talk, I will briefly introduce the areas of visualization and visual analytics, with a specific focus on visualizing text and document collections. I will present examples of common visualizations, highlighting potential strengths and weaknesses, and discuss how human visual perception informs our design of perceptually salient visualizations.

I will then present methods to summarize text and document collections using visualization, and explain how properties like sentiment can be estimated from to augment short text snippets. I will demonstrate an interactive web-based application that visualizes tweets containing user-selected keywords as an example of this research.

I will conclude by presenting a collaboration with research in public policy and anthropology, where we are studying the use of our visualization tool for risk management and communication during wildfire events.

Bio. Dr. Christopher G. Healey is a tenured Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Goodnight Distinguished Professor of Analytics in the Institute for Advanced Analytics, both at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina.

He has received $5.5 million in external funding from sources that include the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Army Research Office (ARO), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the National Security Agency (NSA), and major industrial partners like Microsoft Corporation, IBM, SAS Institute, and Hewlett-Packard.

Healey has published over 50 articles in major journals and conferences in the areas of visualization, visual and data analytics, computer graphics, and artificial intelligence. He is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s CAREER Early Faculty Development Award and the North Carolina State University Outstanding Instructor Award. Healey is a Senior Member of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and an Associate Editor of ACM Transaction on Applied Perception, the leading worldwide journal on the application of human perception to issues in computer science.

Keynote Speaker: Joel Brandt, Director of Research Engineering at Adobe Systems

Joel Brandt

Supporting Opportunistic Programmers with Better Visualizations (PDF)

Abstract. The majority of people who write computer programs today are not professionally trained software engineers working on large codebases. They are scientists, analysts, designers, and other knowledge workers for whom programming is a tool in support of their primary work. We call this group of software developers opportunistic programmers. In this talk, I will present findings from our empirical work with this community that characterize their work practices and information needs. I will focus primarily on two tasks central to their workflow: just-in-time learning of new technologies and approaches, and code understanding to inform modification and reuse. I will detail systems that both I and others have built that endeavor to better support these workflows, and will conclude with a series of open problems that I believe the software visualization community could help solve.

Bio. Joel Brandt is a human-computer interaction researcher and Director of Research Engineering in the Creative Technologies Lab CTL at Adobe Research. Through a mix of empirical work and systems building, he studies how to build tools that support creative work. Recently, much of his research has focused on how to provide better tool support to software developers. The tools resulting from his research are used by millions of Adobe’s customers. Examples include the Blueprint code search engine, the live development, autocomplete, and extensibility features of Brackets, and the Generator extensibility layer for Photoshop. Joel completed his Ph.D. in the HCI Group at Stanford University in 2010, advised by Scott Klemmer. He completed his B.S. and M.S. at Washington University in St. Louis in 2005.